


Catch the Wheel

by solysal



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, but still, shikamaru is fully aware that sasuke is a walking disaster, some points were made, who doesn't love the smell of marx in the morning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 14:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19111345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solysal/pseuds/solysal
Summary: A revolution, more than anything else, was a matter of will. Naturally, there were people more suited to this line of thinking than others. Shikamaru was not one of them.





	Catch the Wheel

A revolution, more than anything else, was a matter of will. There were layers around it, logistics and details borne from whatever system was about to have the rug pulled out from under it, but, at its core, a revolution was two halves uncompromising, ruthless pride: one, things can be better, two, we ( _I_ ) can make them so.

Naturally, there were people more suited to this line of thinking than others. Shikamaru was not one of them.

He was playing Shogi by himself, recreating a match against his father. It was a useful exercise: re-imagining the past, testing the faults in what time had set in stone. The best laid plans, after all, had a habit of falling through. Shimura Danzo, his right arm clotted Sharingan red, was rotting in the earth for a reason. There was a place for strategy, for blueprints and gambits--Shikamaru wasn’t about to put his entire clan out of job--but he wasn’t (unlike a disturbing proportion of his peers) stubborn enough to ignore a lesson repeated ad nauseum. The best defense against the future was an open, adaptable mind. He’d lost count of the number of times Naruto had disappeared behind an impossible horizon and come back--like there was nothing to it at all but to try.

That was the difference, he supposed, between the two of them. Naruto was out on a mission to fulfill a thousand year old prophecy, and Shikamaru was in Konoha, rewinding his losses on a shogi board. On days like this, when the roar of the battlefield was an echo at Konoha’s gates, it pulled Shikamaru’s mind into something like normalcy.  

It’s _normal_ to think. The Nara don’t have any kind of hegemony over scrutiny or contemplation, no matter how much Kiba said otherwise. The thing that separated the Nara from the other Founding Clans was this: it was impossible to inherit a mind. Ino had lectured circles around him about nature and nurture, about how things like personality and disposition were really just a stockpile of habits that could be taken apart and built into something new.

“We’re all fucked up, but there’s nothing about ourselves that we can’t unlearn,” Ino had beamed. “It’s all just a matter of motivation. Isn’t that great?”

Which--Ino _would_.  It was one of the operating principles of the T&I Force. Privately, Shikamaru wondered what Morino Ibiki made of Ino wrapping his entire division around her finger while he was still technically in the process of showing her the ropes.

More privately, Shikamaru wondered if his clan’s thinking wasn’t outright compulsive. There were inclinations, and there was having to routinely fetch one of his older cousins because she had lost another afternoon under a cloudy sky. The clan leadership encouraged them to channel their soul-searching into more acceptable outlets. Shikamaru snorted. If anything was going to unsettle the civilian population it sure as hell wasn't a little syllogism, not when the Hyuuga had milky white eyes that could see through their walls. Still, his clan was eminently practical ( _lazy_ , Neji would have corrected him), and did as they were told  His father had picked up shogi and passed it on to him, his mother ran an ( _entirely legal_ , she insisted) mahjong ring, his aunts bickered over philosophy, his grandfather had written poetry.  

“After all, there’s nothing more dangerous than an idle mind,” the clan elders would say.  

There was, of course, more to their clan. There were deer to feed, forests to tend, shadows to grow. His mother--because she’d never let him have anything without some kind of fight--would scold him for reductive thinking. The Aburame were more than their bugs. The Inuzaka were more than their dogs. That was all well and good, but that didn’t change the fact that the last two Jounin Commanders in Konoha had been Nara.

“It’s called clan monopolization,” Temari had rolled her eyes the last time she was in town, when he’d made this mistake of letting her ask about his plans for the future.

Shikamaru had shrugged. It had been easier than getting at her deeper implication--that the Third Hokage had reduced a position as critical as Konoha’s chief military strategist to a matter of nepotism. Which---the Third Hokage had been Asuma’s father--Shikamaru generally held him in okay regard--but it was getting harder and harder to vouch for him these days.

All this to say: Shikamaru was fairly sure that he hailed from a long line of pathological introversion, and he was currently playing shogi against himself as a way to dull the naked, blistering realization that a good chunk of the people he cared about were recently dead.

This time around, Uchiha Sasuke had screamed revolution--and it was always a new thing, always remade into something stronger and brighter----and Shikamaru had felt something inside him break. He had missed Chouji desperately in that moment. He had wanted Chouji to hold his head in his hands, and promise him that if he just held tight to the people he loved for as long as he could it would all be worth something in the end. Except that Chouji had been on the other side of Kumo, helping stabilize some godforsaken border wall (was still on the other side of Kumo, helping stabilize some godforsaken border wall), and so, Sasuke had screamed revolution, and, for the first time, Shikamaru had let himself listen.

Shikamaru could theorize a thousand different changes to the Five Nations--transnational clan fosterships, lobbying daimyos en bloque, an actual fucking war crimes tribunal--could map them out, then dismantle them, then rework them into something better--all in the middle hours of the night, between when he finished revising his contingencies for all the ways Ino and Chouji could go where his shadows couldn’t and when his eyelids finally fluttered shut. Shikamaru was keenly, exhaustively aware that his life as dictated by the current Kage-Daimyo system was an onslaught of recurrent trauma and chronic underpayment. He was also keenly, exhaustively aware of the impracticality of doing anything about it.

(His father had tried to teach him the trick, when he was younger, of holding two incompatible truths in his mind. It was all a question of context. In the right circumstances, anything could be true. )

Sasuke--Sasuke brandished the Uchiha Massacre like a war banner, but Sasuke was far from the first Konoha shinobi to look at the mountain of dead tallied on the Memorial Stone and dream a way to strip the names of the people he loved from its face. Shikamaru had studied revolutions (technically, all of the Konoha Twelve had, but he doubted anyone other than Sakura remembered). In general, they tended to fail. In Konoha, they failed spectacularly.

Konoha had suffered a grand total of one successful revolution (the one that resulted in its founding, no less), and for all that Hashirama brokered a miracle peace out of centuries of grievances, the only difference it made was that the daimyo began hiring villages instead of clans. Mizuki had looked up from his notes at the front of the classroom and closed off the unit by declaring revolutions messy, and in the Ninja Academy’s esteemed opinion, hardly worth the effort. Sakura disagreed. Violently.

“You’re completely ignoring the child soldiers thing,” Sakura had pointed out, cracking her shoulders to work out the tension in her muscles after their last spar.

Shikamaru had looked up at her from where he lay flat on his back. Predictably, she had wiped the floor with him. “Sakura, we’re child soldiers.”

Sakura had waved a hand. “We’re not four. Also, you know _peace_. It was called the Warring States Period for a reason.”

He’d had to forfeit the point entirely when she reminded him that Mizuki had been branded a traitor to the village after they graduated, and none of their instructors had actually thought to go back and check over his lesson plans. Shikamaru had felt reasonable, though, maintaining that no institution would preach the criteria for its dissolution.

“The power of the government derives from the consent of the governed,” Sai, of all people, had chipped in, like _Shikamaru_ was the one who spent his childhood forgetting his emotions in an Anbu shadow cell.

Sakura had smiled sunnily, which was how Shikamaru had known Sai was being an asshole. Sai understood better than anyone that history was a matter of omission. He didn’t need Shikamaru to remind him of all the aborted “mass mobilizations” wiped from Konoha’s public records--not because they failed, but because of how close they came to succeeding.

Shikamaru was willing to admit that, maybe, a revolution was not something you could learn. Or, if it was, that his education was lacking. He’d certainly never seen Sasuke coming. Before his life had gone to shit, Shikamaru had always figured that if there was anything better out there, it looked like this: Naruto with his back to the edge of the world and the sun in the width of his smile. Now that his life had gone to shit, he wanted to tell his father to backdate Umino Iruka a thousand years of overtime for the fact that Naruto hadn’t ripped Konoha to shreds the instant he had any semblance of control over the Nine Tails .  It was a testament to who Iruka was as a teacher and a human being.

Or maybe it was this.  Sasuke had always known what he had lost. Naruto, for all that he was gathering embers and ashes, would never know. He might memorize its topography--annotate it with names and genealogies, measures of warmth and light--but, even if he rebuilt Uzushio from the ground up, he would only ever know what it had been through its absence. Shikamaru didn’t think it was much of a way to know someone at all.

(“I was thinking of calling her Mirai,” Kurenai had said, the last time Shikamaru had visited.

Shikamaru had nodded, and the thought had flashed, like he was drunk, that Asuma might have lived if only Shikamaru had loved him more.)

Naruto could spin gold, was spinning gold, and Shikamaru believed in him like he believed that he would never beat his father in shogi, like he believed that the forests of Konoha never really ended. Naruto could turn a fist into an open hand in the blink of an eye, could argue with monsters and legends and gods, could pull the village from where it sat teetering on the edge of the dark unknown that Sasuke, Obito, and Madara were fighting to give shape to. Only, the Nara grew up in shadows--it was woven into his bones, it was why he was sitting on his porch and not tearing through the Root archives--and their children were taught at an early age that mastery was the better part of fear.

Just--shinobi were literally rising out of their graves, and Shino and Hinata had still had to leave on a protection detail because the daimyo’s second son was getting engaged. Shikamaru had bitten down hard on his cigarette and tried not to choke. Hinata had chattered idly about Naruto’s latest mission report before she left, the villages he was rallying, the coalition that was taking shape. Shikamaru had forced himself to nod along, had pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled smoke. He believed in Naruto like he believed Hidan would die. Naruto would save what was left to be saved, and the daimyo’s second son would get married.

So: there was nothing more dangerous than an idle mind, and Shikamaru was thinking. He thought: Momochi Zabuza was nine years old when he murdered his graduating class. He thought: Uzushio disappeared in a single day. He thought: a revolution is a visceral, bleeding thing, but it was also a matter of will--of _pride_ \--and the Uchiha had that in spades.

\---

Shikamaru found Sasuke at the border of Iwagakure. The night was thick and deep, and five different sets of blades nestled lovingly against his throat.  Shikamaru grinned.

"Hey, Sasuke. Long time no see. Tell me, how are you with constructive criticism?"

**Author's Note:**

> no one talks to me about habermas anymore, so i made this instead. sasuke does not take constructive criticism, but, in shikamaru's defense, everyone else in taka absolutely does.


End file.
